U. of C. shows items from Atomic Age time capsule

University of Chicago

Then University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins and Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi (right) prepare to place a time capsule in the cornerstone of the Research Institutes building on June 21, 1949. Members of the Enrico Fermi Institute and the James Franck Institute will unveil the contents of the time capsule in a public event beginning at 4 p.m. Thursday.

Then University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins and Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi (right) prepare to place a time capsule in the cornerstone of the Research Institutes building on June 21, 1949. Members of the Enrico Fermi Institute and the James Franck Institute will unveil the contents of the time capsule in a public event beginning at 4 p.m. Thursday. (University of Chicago)

Staff report

A 1948 University of Chicago telephone directory —- the size of a booklet —- and a Capital Airlines timetable were among the relics in a time capsule that one of the fathers of the atomic bomb placed inside a campus science building more than 60 years ago.

The university presented the items to the public Thursday afternoon at the Research Institute Building, where Enrico Fermi led the team that built the first nuclear reactor in the early 1940s.

Fermi and then-university president Robert Maynard Hutchins put the copper box in the building’s cornerstone in 1949. The facility at 5640 S. Ellis Ave. is scheduled to be demolished in August to make way for the new Eckhardt Research Center.

The box, now rendered a charcoal color, was first opened four weeks ago so university officials could examine its contents, a spokesman said.

It also contained a road map, an announcements book, other timetables, booklets on various scientific subjects, and the architect’s rendering of the Research Institute Building -- which Professor Emeritus Roger Hildebrand noted was without a namesake.

“After all, who would want his name attached to this?” he said as a joke.

A release from the university originally had said that the capsule would be "opened" today, but a spokesman for the university later acknowledged that it was first opened about a month ago to ensure its contents were intact.

Speakers at today's ceremony included the dean of Physical Sciences at the U. of C., Robert Fefferman, as well as Hildebrand and chemistry Professor Stephen Berry.

Hildebrand studies and maps interstellar dust clouds and Fefferman is a mathematician, according to the U. of C. Berry studies subatomic structures.

“The Eckhardt Center will host a broad spectrum of 21st-century science, from investigation of the deepest cosmic mysteries to manipulating matter on the scale of atoms and molecules,” according to the release.

The Research Institute Building once housed the Enrico Fermi Institute, which focuses on nuclear studies, and the James Franck Institute, which focuses on the study of metals. Part of the Fermi Institute will be housed at the new building, while the Franck Institute is housed at another building.

Both institutes were founded in 1945, three years after Fermi led the team that created the first artificial nuclear chain-reaction, in converted squash courts under Stagg Field, the university’s football stadium.

The Fermi and Franck institutes “continued the dialogue between pure science and technology that the Manhattan Project had initiated, and helped ease the barriers between traditional scientific disciplines,” according to the release. A score of Nobel laureates -- including Fermi himself, who won a Nobel prize for his nuclear research in 1938, at age 37 -- worked in the building when it housed the institutes.